The New York Times's extensive mea culpa over the Jayson Blair affair is not the end of the story, writes Tim Rutten
American journalism seldom has produced anything quite like the extraordinary act of contrition the New York Times published on Sunday in its account of the systematic fraud perpetrated by 27-year-old reporter Jayson Blair, who resigned from the paper earlier this month.
The only precedent for so sweeping an admission of failure and wrongdoing that comes to mind is the special section the Los Angeles Times published after it was revealed that the separation between the paper's advertising and editorial departments had been deliberately breached during production of a Sunday magazine focused on the opening of Staples Centre.
The candid and public mea culpa for the Staples affair notwithstanding, sweeping changes subsequently were made in the Los Angeles Times newsroom. Sunday's New York Times account of its scandal concludes with comments by Arthur Sulzberger jnr, the paper's publisher and chairman of its parent company.
Mr Sulzberger said that while the Blair affair pointed to a need for better communication within the paper's newsroom, there would be no hunt for scapegoats. "The person who did this is Jayson Blair," he said. "Let's not begin to demonise our executives - either the desk editors or the executive editor [Howell Raines] or, dare I say, the publisher."
On Wednesday, Mr Raines told a fraught meeting of the paper's journalists that he accepted ultimate responsibility for the debacle but would not be resigning.
And despite the New York Times's extraordinarily detailed explication of Mr Blair's career within the paper and the jaw-dropping scope of his deceit, it seems unlikely that the coming weeks of controversy and reflection will not bring with them additional assignments of responsibility.
The Times's narrative account - which was put together by five reporters, including Adam Liptak, a lawyer - began in the upper left-hand corner of the first page and extended across two full pages within the first section. Two subsequent pages were filled with a story-by-story examination of the 73 reports Mr Blair had filed since October, when he went from the sports department to roving national correspondent assigned to major stories.
More than half those stories - 38 in all - were unreliable, the Times found. Seventeen of them contained factual errors; six contained plagiarised material; in 29 instances, Mr Blair affixed fraudulent datelines to his reports, claiming to be where news was breaking when, in fact, he was home in Brooklyn. The Times invited its readers to "report any additional falsehoods in Mr Blair's work" to a special email address.
It is hard to imagine a more humbling plea from a news organisation that a little more than a year ago was celebrating the record seven Pulitzer Prizes it received for its coverage of the September 11th attacks.
To other analysts, Mr Blair's story represents a cautionary tale that extends beyond the Times. "One would have to say there is getting to be something of a tradition of trouble caused by young journalists with unbridled ambitions and hyperventilated notions of careerism," said Orville Schell, dean of the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.
Mr Schell noted that in the Times account, Mr Raines, the executive editor, said that - despite Mr Blair's troubled record of errors and erratic personal behaviour - he had encouraged his assignment to the Washington, DC area sniper story because the reporter was "hungry".
"I flagged that word immediately," Mr Schell said. " 'Hungry' is a sword that cuts two ways. I certainly know what Howell means, in that you want someone who will work hard and will make his journalistic craft the most important thing in his life. But the mutant form of that is the morality of a reporter like Jayson Blair. Do whatever it takes to get ahead - lie, cheat, steal and deceive - because the end justifies the means, and the only end is your own advancement."
The least credible and complete portion of the Times's account is its categorical denial that the unusual tolerance and solicitude the paper accorded Mr Blair, who is black, had anything to do with his race. Like other major American news organisations, the Times has in recent years made strenuous efforts to compensate for the decades of discrimination that kept women and minority reporters out of their newsrooms. The New York Times, in particular, has had demonstrable difficulties recruiting and retaining black reporters and editors.
The Times report is candid about the severe criticisms directed at Mr Blair by the two metropolitan editors prior to his assignment to the paper's national staff. It is less forthcoming about the close mentor-protégé relationship that apparently existed between Mr Blair and the Times's managing editor, Gerald Boyd, who also is black. By the Times's account, Mr Boyd was head of a committee that recommended Mr Blair be hired, despite the reservations of other editors.
Mr Boyd, along with Mr Raines, pushed the inexperienced reporter with a poor record on to the prestigious national staff.
What the Times does not note is that in 2001 it was the tyro Mr Blair who nominated Mr Boyd for the National Association of Black Journalists' journalist of the year award for his role in producing the Pulitzer Prize-winning series "How Race Is Lived in America." When Mr Boyd subsequently was promoted to managing editor, according to sources at the Times, Mr Blair was selected to write the announcement for the paper's in-house newsletter.
While opponents of newsroom diversity are bound to make much of these facts, they stand just as strongly as an argument for making sure that women and minorities are represented in appropriate numbers. It may be that the paucity of black reporters at the Times led editors there to make extraordinary - and ultimately disastrous - accommodations for a clearly troubled young reporter.
"It is my experience that every media outlet, particularly the New York Times, is very conscious of its need to diversify its newsroom," said Berkeley's Mr Schell. "When they come to recruit our graduates, they are most interested in filling their diversity needs. They want the minority graduates, but they don't have any ready provision to help them through the system. It's like a ladder with rungs missing."
When someone puts his foot where something solid ought to be and finds only air, he falls. Sometimes, he drags others with him. - (LA Times-Washington Post Service)
Tim Rutten writes about the media for the LA Times.